Climate change is pushing an Indigenous community in Panama off their island home

• The Guna people living on an island in Panama called Carti Sugtupu will soon relocate to the mainland.
• Rising sea levels have caused harsher storms and tougher living conditions on the island.
• Their resettlement could become a blueprint for other at-risk coastal communities.

On a tiny island off the coast of Panama, about 1,200 Indigenous locals known as the Guna people are waiting to leave. 

The island, which is called Carti Sugtupu, is over the size of four football fields and is only 3.2 feet above sea level. In recent years, its residents have increasingly felt the impacts of climate change, weathering brutal storms and flooding.